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Open Files with App Switcher

Using the Application Switcher to open files can sometimes be faster than hunting for an Application's window or searching through a jam packed Dock for an Application's icon. First grab your file, press Command-Tab, and then drop the file onto the desired application's icon to open it within that program.

TidBITS Watchlist: Notable Software Updates for 10 March 2014

BBEdit 10.5.9 and TextWrangler 4.5.7 -- Bare Bones Software has released BBEdit 10.5.9 and TextWrangler 4.5.7, with both updates devoted solely to squashing a variety of bugs. The two text editors tackle many of the same issues, including patching memory leaks related to progress dialogs and the font system, improving performance when generating syntax-coloring information for extremely large files, fixing a bug that blanked out one pane of a split-pane text view, and putting a stop to attempts to mount volumes that aren’t available while reopening files
during state restoration at startup. The BBEdit update also fixes performance issues when filtering directories for the Subversion “Show Working Copy Status” command, and improves the printing innards for live preview windows so that the printed output is closer to expectations. ($49.99 for BBEdit, free update, 12.5 MB, release notes; free for TextWrangler, 9.4 MB, release notes)

Dragon Dictate 4.0 -- Nuance has released Dragon Dictate 4.0, a major new release of the Mac dictation software that continues to improve accuracy and reduce latency while also adding the capability to transcribe text from any single speaker’s pre-recorded audio file. Once you’ve created a profile of a speaker from a 90-second clip, you’ll be able to transcribe recordings (such as interviews, college lectures, and more) from a wide variety of audio file formats (including .mp3, .aiff, .m4a, .m4v, and .wav). Dragon Dictate 4.0’s new Full Text Control feature enables you to
mix talking and typing in Apple’s Pages 4.3, as well as manage the Gmail inbox within Safari or Firefox. The new Smart Format Rules store user-specific formatting of dates, numbers, titles, and other text, and Dragon Dictate will remember corrections and can adapt to your formatting preferences.

The digital download is available now, and you can currently pre-order the physical disc version for shipment starting on 18 March 2014. Registered owners of MacSpeech Dictate or Dragon Dictate can upgrade to Dragon Dictate 4.0 for $149.99, and there is also a $129.99 student/teacher edition for qualified students and faculty. ($199.99 new, $149.99 upgrade from previous versions, 28.8 MB)

Delicious Library 3.1.6 -- Delicious Monster has released Delicious Library 3.1.6 with a number of bug fixes. The media cataloging app now ensures that duplicating items with custom covers doesn’t render the cover in low resolution, fixes an issue that prevented some collections from being exported to XML, addresses a crash that occurred when publishing collections without a defined type, provides a workaround in OS X 10.9 Mavericks for failed lookups that occurred due to a user’s region being set outside the United States, and improves Spotlight updating speeds. ($25 new from Delicious Monster and the Mac App Store, free update, 77.5 MB)

OmniOutliner 4.0.3 -- The Omni Group has released OmniOutliner 4.0.3, with fixes for multiple crashes related to using the style theming interface and for notes that disappeared at the start of editing when displayed in-pane. The flexible outline and information organization app also now ensures that edits made to embedded attachments are always saved and that linked attachments appear immediately (instead of having to wait until reopening a file). And while the update also improves typing in long documents, Omni promises more optimizations and asks for examples of files that continue to perform badly to be sent to omnioutliner@omnigroup.com. OmniOutliner is available in a Standard edition for $49.99 and a Pro edition for $99.99 (the latter with additional user interface elements and AppleScript support), and both the Standard and Pro editions are available in the Mac App Store. For more information, see “OmniOutliner 4 Refines the Outlining Process” (31 January 2014). ($49.99 new, free update, 43.2 MB, release
notes)

Retrospect 11 -- Retrospect Inc. has released Retrospect 11 for Mac, a major update to the backup software that’s used primarily by small and medium-sized businesses with mixed-platform networks. (In addition to the Mac update, Retrospect 9 for Windows was also released.) The big news for Retrospect 11 is that it adds a block-level incremental backup option, which should boost performance as it backs up only those portions of files that are modified since the previous backup. This option needs to be enabled in your backup scripts or in the backup wizard while using existing selectors or rules.

Retrospect also adds a new high-level dashboard, which provides a weekly backup summary and a visualization of recent backups to help identify storage usage and ensure complete data protection for your network. Additionally, the improved email reporting includes the operations log for a view into the complete details of your backup process. (For more details on these new features, see this What’s New overview at the Retrospect Web site.) Many bugs are also addressed, with version 11 fixing several intermittent cases of Past Backups not refreshing; correctly displaying server-specific changes when connected to multiple servers; correcting the days of the
week in scripts for the German, French, and Italian localizations; and allowing the sorting of media sets that are in the Busy state.

Retrospect 11 pricing ranges from $119 for Retrospect Desktop (for a single non-server computer and up to 5 additional networked computers) to $499 (single-server with up to 20 workstation clients), all the way up to $2,199 (for multiple servers and unlimited clients). ($119–$2,199 new, $69–$1,299 upgrades, 362 MB, release notes)